Internal investment
HP's spending a shed load more on investing in Linux internally. Fingers crossed they mean it.
HP has increased its support for the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization that promotes the growth and development of the free Linux operating system, by upping its membership level from Gold to Platinum status. The new membership level, which requires HP to pay $500,000 in annual dues to the Foundation, puts the PC …
Recently had to work on a DL380p and the new HP Intelligent Provisioning application on the NAND looks like it runs some form of Linux.
Also, if Steam starts to get serious about their Linux games, HP would be probably keen to ensure their prospective consumers have decent graphics drivers.
> HP Intelligent Provisioning application on the NAND looks like it runs some form of Linux.
Certainly their SmartStartScripting toolkit runs on OpenSUSE.
Configure all the pre-install stuff and kexec into your Linux install of choice. Makes building these things a treat.
HP has been a friend of Linux just about forever. A bipolar friend with multiple personality disorder ("HP recommends Microsoft Windows" on their Linux landing page for example), but a friend. As I've put on here before, HP has always donated servers to Kernel.org for example. They support multiple distros. They contribute to the kernel. Except for a short period with laptop wireless chipsets they pay attention to component driver availability in their build designs. Printer driver support is huge and they've got that covered with over 1,000 models of printer.
<--- humour
They can probably defend themselves, however...
Every year since whenever they have spent $millions supporting F/OSS projects though GSoC, developing and supporting the ecosystem and demanding no say over what and how is developed
http://code.google.com/soc/
as evidenced
(1) http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2012/Projects
(2) http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/userrel/soc/
(3) http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:GSOC
(4) http://www.gnome.org/news/2012/03/gnome-to-participate-in-google-summer-of-code-2012/
(5) http://dot.kde.org/2012/10/02/kde-celebrates-2012-google-summer-code-success
i already purchased and recommended HP for all printer purchases due to their linux support as all pc's i work on get moved over to linux. this latest move just adds luster to their image in my mind and will translate to purchases across all their product lines, although i don't expect to mend their financials single-handedly.